I pieced this together because I got the bucket for a good deal.

Still missing one of the two gold Vahis (Yeah, it has two...) Other than completing the set, I have had no reason to pay the prices for a second gold Vahi.

Someone else gets to type up the inventory for this one. I don't think I have it, and if I do it's still sealed. And besides, I did the last one:

https://brickset.com/article/58924

Alright, I've just looked at the inventory for this set, and I can safely conclude not one single element is 'exclusive'.

So Star Wars fans, there you go.

I think this is pretty cool to be honest. I'd love one.

@WemWem said:
"This looks like a barrel of Utz Pretzels."

It looks like a bodybuilders protein powder!

As I never encountered one when they were out, I later found out about them online. Even later I learnt that these include 5 Vahki and 1 Rahkshi + a lot of other random parts. Pretty cool. If you're a MOCer these sets would be very useful! But at the same time anyone who got this would still get a lot of characters to start with (massable ones at that).

Got this in store back when it came out and in retrospect it was a really good value at the time even without factoring in the mask of time.

big Bionicle tub my beloved

Seems around this time, LEGO had a ton of "bucket" or "pretzel jar" type sets that included quite a large number of "random" pieces that varied between different sets of the same.

So, was it a way to clear out the warehouse, or what?

@DavidSkyroller said:
" @PurpleDave said:
"Someone else gets to type up the inventory for this one. I don't think I have it, and if I do it's still sealed. And besides, I did the last one:

https://brickset.com/article/58924"

I actually had two of these, and the contents were different. One had a set of Vahki minus the green one (Vorzakh), and the other had a set of Vahki minus the Brown one (Zadakh). I collected green, so I had already bought one Vorzakh, which meant I was a Zadakh short of two complete sets for many years. There was also only one yellow Tohunga foot between the two kits. (I know this well because I didn't have Jala or Jaller when I was a kid, so when building MOCs I would always limit its location to centerlines because I always wanted to maintain symmetry back then.) I'm pretty sure the randomness of the contents was the reason they list the piece count as 400+ instead of a specific number."

So you're saying you were one Zadakh short of a complete set? That sounds almost as bad a being a few fries short of a happy meal, or one banana short of a bunch! ;-P

@thor96 said:
" @WemWem said:
"This looks like a barrel of Utz Pretzels."

It looks like a bodybuilders protein powder!"

You *could* build a few Bionicle bodies with it.

@Binnekamp said:
"As I never encountered one when they were out, I later found out about them online. Even later I learnt that these include 5 Vahki and 1 Rahkshi + a lot of other random parts. Pretty cool. If you're a MOCer these sets would be very useful! But at the same time anyone who got this would still get a lot of characters to start with (massable ones at that)."

Maybe this one has complete characters, but 8711 had tons of parts that still relied on pins and axles to connect with each other. You really couldn’t build anything with just the contents of that tub. Of course, pretty much everything from launch to the Bohrok-Kal hewed closely enough to the theme’s Technic roots to rely on a pile of pins and axles to hold everything together. They weren’t trying to clear out inventory of basic connectors that were still in regular use, so from their end there wasn’t any point to grabbing a handful and chucking it in the tub. But without them, that first tub really relied on you having a lot of other parts to be even slightly useful.

These were fantastic parts packs, good value if you could find them at a store and they often had rarer parts, like dark Orange Lewa Nuva katanas from 8594, which given that this was a 2005 set, effectively could be used as an add-on pack for 8811 to give the Kikanalo an orange horn like the chief in the Bionicle 2 movie. Heck, I got a green Hockey torso from one of these, which led to a lot of curiosity and creative building. The Masks and Disks of Time weren't exclusive as those also came in certain distributions of Vahki, but I'm not one to complain about getting extras, especially since the Mask of Time as designed can gain plastic bend marks near the Swiss cheese holes if you put them in a bin.

I honestly think a contributing reason Hero Factory withered and Bionicle G2 died is that they never released barrels like these. Hero Factory only explored the "build your own Hero" concept with 11995, which was online-exclusive, very restrictive, and overpriced compared to a canister off the shelf. Bionicle G2 didn't sell as many people on CCBS as a versatile building system as old fans were most interested in the characters and detractors already had their minds made up by Hero Factory's basic set design and art style like Dave here.

Bonkle supremacy
BONKLE SUPREMACY!

Were these Bionicle accessory tubs ever available in Europe, or anywhere outside of America? I knew they were a thing from back in the day when I followed BZP's Bionicle news very closely, but don't think I've ever seen them myself.

This one in particular I assume was US-only, since to the best of my knowledge we never got the mask-and-disk of time promo in the Vakhi (not for my lack of looking for it, because BZP never specified that the promo *wasn't* worldwide so I definitely went searching for it in the UK when I was buying my last Vakhi!) so I'd guess that those specific parts just never officially made it to this side of the pond; but again that is just me guessing, I never knew for sure. The online Bionicle fandom seemed very America-centric at the time; so aside from the Visorak/Hordika release order switcharound, availability of things outside of the US was rarely discussed anywhere that I saw.

Are they exclusive?

@ThatBionicleGuy:
I can’t answer your question, but I can comment on the NA/EU differences. EU got some of the 2001 sets (Turaga and Kanohi pack) in January, which led to the misprints being EU exclusives (barring a few that snuck into official retail sets, like the black Ruru). NA got the full wave all at once in the summer. EU then had to wait at least a month for the Toa and Rahi to show up, so neither region really got preferential treatment at that time.

There were two masks released in copper. NA got one bundled with canister sets that had incredibly limited availability, while LEGOLAND Billund (and perhaps Windsor) got the two-pack that was the only source of the second mask. There was also a TNG mask that was a LEGOLAND exclusive on both sides of the pond. I know the orange Vahi had an odd release, but I don’t remember the details other than that they’d cancelled the original plans for that mask after it was produced (I got handed a few at one point).

I don’t remember if the gold Hau was region restricted, but there was one silver Krana promo run in NA, and a separate version of the same run in the EU, so neither of the two main regions missed out on that. The platinum mask, obviously, was limited to a single person, and I think did end up in the US, but I don’t know if the promotion was region restricted or if it was advertised as being possible to pull it worldwide.

Andy Mac, a pro skateboarder based out of the US, was a prominent marketing figure in the first year, and all the online stuff was initially run out of LEGO Direct in Manhattan. English is the official language of TLG, and probably the most widely spoken in their major markets at the time, so it certainly makes sense that the story side would be primarily in English.

Regarding stuff like Good Guy and Bad Guy, they were free with a pack of batteries. They barely qualified as models, and weren’t key characters in the story. Mostly they would be of interest to completionists, but I don’t think NA was the only market to get some of these oddball sets. 1441 appears to have been exclusive to Belgium.

@Alia_of_AGL: This wasn't a "Build your own hero" set, it was a way for Lego to get rid of inventory that they had no further use for.

@TheOtherMike said:
" @Alia_of_AGL: This wasn't a "Build your own hero" set, it was a way for Lego to get rid of inventory that they had no further use for."

I'm well aware, I'm not stupid. That doesn't change the impact it has on the consumer end. Even though it was inventory clearance on Lego's part, it was MOC fuel on the consumer end, much like a conventional brick bucket. The fact that a product is a tactical liquidation has no bearing on how it is received by the consumer; a consumer isn't buying it because it's a transfer of space-consuming inventory, they're buying it to be used, and belittling it as such is dumb because this long predates the usage of Lego by resellers as a stock investment. Even though CCBS reinvented itself way less frequently than G1 Bionicle changing whole builds almost annually before the Inika, there were parts absolutely wave-specific that could have been liquidated in such a way that benefitted the creativity and longevity of the system.

@GSR_MataNui said:
"The Void was a concept in BIONICLE that was never fully explored or explained, one of the few mysteries of the franchise to remain an enigma to this day.

When the Toa fought Makuta for the first time at the end of the 2001 story he was found underneath a swirling black vortex he called The Void. While from a distance The Void resembled a collection of black goopy tentacles, on closer inspection it was revealed to be a mass of rusted and separated BIONICLE pieces. When the Toa commented on how odd it was Makuta looked just like a regular old Matoran villager, he asked if they were expecting something different, and then a tentacle from The Void lashed down, ripping him to him to shreds and pulling his remains into the mass. Maktua then spoke through The Void, continuing to taunt the Toa as he attacked them.

There are two common in-universe explanations for what the Void is. Thanks to information we were given on the Makuta as a race later on in the series it's possible these are the raw components Makuta uses to build Rahi animals, or former Rahi ready to be recycled into new ones. The more macabe interpretation is that since all the parts we see in The Void were used in the 2001 Toa Mata sets is that it's the rotting and dismembered corpses of Toa Makuta has killed in the past, used as a way to taunt his newest foes. A combination of the two is also possible, and either way it was a method for the dark lord to taunt his foes.

Out of universe we do have an official confirmation as to what The Void represents. Prior to the Megatron-ification of Makuta as an antagonist, he and his brother were meant to reflect to process of building LEGO. Mata Nui was the spirit of creation, building a set, while Maktua was the spirit of destruction, taking it apart when you are done playing. Under this metaphor The Void represented a box of loose LEGO parts, the messy and nonsensical mass all LEGO creations come from and to which they return.

While this tub of parts is never canonically confirmed to be a representation of The Void, if you had to assign lore to it that's the closest concept. "

damn, you actually found some lore here. genuinely impressed, was thinking you would just say something like:
lore time!
this is a bunch of bionicle parts
lore time over!

@Alia_of_AGL said:
" @TheOtherMike said:
" @Alia_of_AGL: This wasn't a "Build your own hero" set, it was a way for Lego to get rid of inventory that they had no further use for."

I'm well aware, I'm not stupid. That doesn't change the impact it has on the consumer end. Even though it was inventory clearance on Lego's part, it was MOC fuel on the consumer end, much like a conventional brick bucket. The fact that a product is a tactical liquidation has no bearing on how it is received by the consumer; a consumer isn't buying it because it's a transfer of space-consuming inventory, they're buying it to be used, and belittling it as such is dumb because this long predates the usage of Lego by resellers as a stock investment. Even though CCBS reinvented itself way less frequently than G1 Bionicle changing whole builds almost annually before the Inika, there were parts absolutely wave-specific that could have been liquidated in such a way that benefitted the creativity and longevity of the system."

Oh, I misunderstood your point.